September 14, 2010

When a federal fisheries scientist sought to learn how ocean currents affect the catch rate of lobsters, he turned to a University of Rhode Island oceanographer who had developed an innovative and inexpensive meter for measuring currents near the bottom of bays, rivers and other shallow waters.

So did aquaculture farmers in Rhode Island looking to identify the best site for farming oysters, Cape Cod officials interested in understanding tidal fluctuations in Waquoit Bay, and students at Cohasset (Mass.) High School studying circulation patterns in Cohasset Bay.

They all called on Vitalii Sheremet, associate marine research scientist at URI's Graduate School of Oceanography, whose expertise about currents, tides and waves, along with his SeaHorse tilt current meter, provided the answers.

Currents cause the meter - a buoyant plastic pipe containing an accelerometer and an electronics package that is anchored vertically to the sea floor - to tilt at an angle, with stronger currents creating a greater tilt.

"It's lightweight, it's inexpensive, it's easy to deploy, and you can deploy large numbers of them to gain different perspectives on whatever problem you're looking at," said Sheremet.

Most current meters used by scientists cost about $15,000 each, while Sheremet's meter is only about $500, and he makes each one by hand. It takes him about a week to build and calibrate 10 of them. He hopes to have them commercially available sometime next year as soon as the final design is chosen.

Sheremet takes custom orders for his meter from fellow researchers around the world, and he has provided several dozen to URI faculty and students. They have been used in the Red Sea, the Black Sea, off the coast of Taiwan, and in the waters around New England and Hawaii.

This month, 50 meters are being deployed in the Gulf of Maine to monitor the currents around lobster traps. In a joint project with Jim Manning, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Sheremet is studying how the orientation of lobster traps relative to the direction of the current and tides affects how many lobsters are caught. The project may boost the lobster fishing industry by indicating which direction the trap mouth should face to have the greatest likelihood of catching the valuable crustaceans.

At Waquoit Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve on Cape Cod, 35 current meters have been deployed since last fall to understand tidal flows and water circulation in the bay.

"Pollution from local rivers runs into the bay," Sheremet said. "It's important to know how the currents flush water from the bay and how larvae are transported."

Sponsored by the Office of Naval Research, the project is helping to evaluate the performance of the SeaHorse tilt current meters.

Sheremet also supervised the work of a team of Cohasset High School students this summer so they could track the flow of wastewater and storm water through Cohasset Harbor and assess how they affect the ecosystem.

"They used my meter and some homemade drifters to measure bottom currents and surface circulation and tidal oscillation in the harbor," he said. "The students learned a great deal about oceanographic measuring techniques and about ocean circulation patterns."

In October the URI scientist will present his technology at a meeting of aquaculture industry representatives. Sheremet said that it is especially important for oyster farmers to select sites that have strong currents, and his meter is the perfect device for identifying the sites with the best flow rate.

Related Stories

(PhysOrg.com) -- New England lobstermen have gone high tech by adding low-cost instruments to their lobster pots that record bottom temperature and provide data that could help improve ocean circulation models in the Gulf ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- A deep ocean current with a volume equivalent to 40 Amazon Rivers has been discovered by Japanese and Australian scientists near the Kerguelen plateau, in the Indian Ocean sector of the Southern Ocean, 4,200 ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Managing the Gulf of Maine’s $300 million lobster industry has been a practice mostly reliant upon the physical size of adult stocks, a system called stock assessment and one that’s made policymaking ...

The rapid growth of the oyster aquaculture industry in Rhode Island has raised questions about how many oyster farms Narragansett Bay and the state's salt ponds can support. But a study by a University of Rhode Island graduate ...

With a coastline stretching from New York Harbor to Cape May, New Jersey stands to benefit from a new study designed to pinpoint the top 20 sites for hydrokinetic energy, a renewable resource produced by the movement of tides, ...

Recommended for you

Five million years ago, the Colorado River met the Gulf of California near the present-day desert town of Blythe, California. The evidence, say University of Oregon geologists, is in the sedimentary rocks exposed at the edges ...

Pressure, temperature and fluid composition play an important role in the amount of metals and other chemicals found in wastewaters from hydraulically fractured gas reservoirs, according to Penn State researchers.

Pioneering work being carried out in a cave in New Mexico by researchers at McMaster University and The University of Akron, Ohio, is changing the understanding of how antibiotic resistance may have emerged and how doctors ...

(Phys.org)—A team of researchers with the European Commission's Joint Research Centre and Google Switzerland has combined historical data with modern mapping engines to produce high-resolution maps of the world's surface ...

The ice sheet covering Greenland is four times bigger than California—and holds enough water to raise global sea-level more than twenty feet if most of it were to melt. Today, sea levels are rising and the melting of Greenland ...

0 comments

Please sign in to add a comment.
Registration is free, and takes less than a minute.
Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.